Friday, February 10, 2012

A Huge Features Post With Tons of Photos and a Little of My Own Stuff Tagged on at the End

Hello! It's been nearly a week since I last posted anything here, but, luckily, the reasons for that haven't at all been bad! This week, I got a substitute teaching job every day, which, even though for today's I went in early and left late, when the teacher decided he wanted to come back to school, was quite nice. It made me sort of a lazy blogger, since I mostly ended up using a laptop for a few minutes and then playing video games at night, rather than designing a lot of patterns or writing anything here. For today, however, I have a massive features post, featuring the work of 7 different crafters, so I hope that you guys enjoy it!

Before I get started with this, I would like to say that I am sure that I probably forgot someone while putting this post together, in which case you should e-mail and let me know, and that there is one person that I cannot remember if I asked permission to feature her piece or not. I've featured her stitching in the past, so I think it'll be okay, but if you are the person I am speaking of and are irritated about this, please contact me and I will edit this entry accordingly. I also will not be writing as much about each piece as usual, as that could take me hours to get through, and the only order that these are in is that of the tabs in my browser window. With all that said, let's start the post!

Our first featured stitcher of the day is Greg, coming to you from the tab that holds my Gmail Inbox! I don't have a blog to link you to on his account, but his stitched version of one of the variants of Pixie from Monster Rancher that I posted quite a while ago came out to look quite pretty! Also, the Roman numerals really add class to any piece, don't they?

My next browser tab contains Topcho's blog, bla. bla? bla!, so she's privy to the second spot with her cute magnetic bookmark, featuring last month's pattern of Ciel from Black Butler/Kuroshitsuji! The magnetic bookmark is a really cool idea, and she made it really well, too. The pink polka dotted backing matches her stitching perfectly!

The next piece for today was stitched by Dawn of Anime Stitching, and it features all of the Death Note character sprites from the most recent sprite patterns December. They look great together, and I have to admit that, if I stitched this, I'd mysteriously have Mello one stitch lower than the rest of the bottom row or something like that as the result of my continuing inability to count. She says that she plans to make this into a pouch for her son's laptop mouse, which should be pretty cool!

Our next feature, from Tiki at Tiki Stitches (whose screenname I just had to check before I typed it, seeing as I apparently have tons of common sense), is another group of patterns from December featuring the cast of The Big Bang Theory! Her stitching came out really well, and her finish is really cute, too! The tiny logo she designed looks perfect, and I love the space fabric, too.

The lovely Mudkip depicted above was stitched by Tama, of Stitching Daze, as a gift for her sister. I know that when I post something of Tama's, I always comment on how fast she is with her stitching, but in this case, she finished Mudkip within a month while having all of her old projects to work on and starting 14 other new ones! Therefore, I have no qualms about, yet again, saying that Tama is remarkably fast with her cross stitching.

The last tab on my browser was Gatchastitch, a blog written by the spiffy pattern designer Gatchacaz, so here is her impressive stitching of the Monkees sprites I posted a few months ago, done as a Christmas gift for her mother! The sprites came out nicely, but the giant Monkees logo that she designed is my favorite part of the piece, and the checkerboard border is really cool, too!

Today's last feature, which involved too much putting-10-pieces-into-one-image to be held in one of my browser tabs is by Deviant Art's prolific and skilled perler artist Otaku Luka! Since I last featured her here, she perlered this blog's sprites of (top row first, from left to right) Yugi and Kaiba from YuGiOh, the Vocaloids Meiko, Luka, and Gumi, Ash and May from Pokemon, Kyoko from Skip Beat!, Cloud from Final Fantasy VII, and Cooking Mama! All of her perlers look bright and nifty, and this set is no exception at all!

Now that all of the features are done, which took over an hour even with my condensed descriptions, I'm going to see if I can type a little about my own work before this computer just stops going for the day! First of all, I finished the strawberry kit from Salvation Army that I talked about in my last post, which was fun to make! It's a little clunky, so I'm not sure what to do with it, but I like the variegated yarn that I used for the border, and, as a whole, I don't think that it looks too bad!

After finishing that, I started on one of the patterns that I posted here, featuring Holo from Spice and Wolf. It's really fun to work on, since she looks really irritated in the pattern, and I'm hoping to have it done in a few days. Here is a bad photo of what I've gotten done so far, though! She looks weird now, but I think it'll get better.

With all of that done, I'm out of stuff to write about for now, but later this weekend, I'm hoping to be back with a new pattern post or something of that sort. Thanks very much for reading, and have a good weekend!